Sunday, 1 June 2014

Indie game review - The Last Tinker - City of Colours

It’s possible that I’m the worst possible person to review The Last Tinker: City of Colours– I’m
playing with mouse and keyboard (never the best for this sort of game!), I’m
not especially great at 3D platformers, and my PC at the moment is so hopeless
that I can only get the game to run at all by reducing everything to the lowest
possible settings – and even then, the frame rate isn’t great. It’s testament to the game then that despite
all these things, I really enjoyed The Last Tinker.

Tinker World is a place made with the power of imagination – but
something’s gone wrong. The three main
colour groups – reds, greens and blues – are getting very suspicious of one
another, and the colours are starting to segregate. Amongst all of this our player character,
Koru, is just trying to have some fun – but it turns out that he is the only
hope for saving Tinkerworld (albeit he unwittingly helps to put it in danger to
begin with) – the Bleakness is coming, draining all colour and life out of
Tinkerworld.

Along with his strange little
companion, Tap, Koru goes on the adventure of a lifetime to save his
world. The Last Tinker is a throw-back
to the days of large roaming 3D platformers and playing the game certain has
that retro feel (though perhaps the fact that I have to run it in 640x480
resolution adds to that!!) – the graphics in fact look gorgeous from the
trailers and screenshots I’ve seen, and I would love to see it in action in a
decent PC. One day…

Anyway, the game starts out a little slowly but it does do a good job
of teaching you the core gameplay mechanics without being too much like a glorified
tutorial. After a scene which I found extremely
difficult at first (after I worked out a couple of things it turned out to be
nowhere near as tough as I’d been thinking it was), Koru manages to sneak into
the legendary Tower and the plot starts to unravel, and that’s when the fun
really starts.

Although there were a couple of bits I found difficult – sometimes due
to the occasional awkwardness of the keyboard controls, at other times simply because
I wasn’t playing the game very well – in general the difficulty level didn’t
seem overly difficult to me, and I’m guessing that as a result of this,
veterans of this genre who have a decent gamepad may find it a tad on the easy
side (that said, there are various difficulty levels). Easy or not though it’s great fun, with a
nice mix of arcade and puzzle elements, and new gameplay elements being
introduced at regular intervals. Also it
has to be said that although I didn’t have too much difficulty progressing
through the game, I certainly hadn’t uncovered every secret and collectable object
in the game world.

The game world is pretty detailed and full of fun features – it holds
together well according to its own logic.
There’s a good dose of humour all the way through and the story is certainly
interesting enough to hold the player’s attention. The characters are daft and fun, and for the
most part the quests you undertake are engaging. The noises made in lieu of speech can get a
bit annoying unless you move on really quickly, and you can only see what
characters are saying in their speech bubbles if you’re looking from the right
angle – minor quibbles and really my only grumbles about the game.

I think it’s a big game – I don’t really know how far through the game
I am so far but after 7 hours playing time, I’ve only managed to get 1 out of
14 achievements! The doesn’t mean I
predict the game will take me 98 hours to complete of course, as some of the achievements
are not tied in to the main plot, but still… I think I’ve got a way to go.

Gamepad and reasonably decent PC recommended to get the most out of it,
but I thoroughly recommend The Last
Tinker: City of Colours. Available on Steam.